With an overlay designed for teachers — easy to use and quick to access the page you need.

“Educa gives educators more time to focus on quality interactions with the children rather than paperwork. It cuts administration time in half.”Julie McClay, Teacher, Kluny Preschool

Most early learning programs are under-staffed. That’s just a fact. And it’s not getting easier. Parents are becoming more demanding, reporting is more complicated and curriculums are expanding.

Time Stealers

Of course, much of your staff’s time is productive — working with children, planning, corresponding with parents. However, in middle of all that there are probably things that are taking more time than they should. For early childhood education programs the main time stealers are:

Paper — for record keeping, filing, notices

Duplication — double-handling

Complication — everything in a different place

These aspects of running an early learning program consume staff time, hours a week, without making your service any better, without impacting learning outcomes or without engaging families.

The Power of Online

Under-staffed and short of time are common issues in business. The response in those industries, and now available for early educators, is moving to the cloud, going online.

This is how Educa works. It is an online platform with an easy-to-use overlay designed specifically for educators, many of whom are tech-averse and busy, needing a super-easy-to-use system.

Being online solves so many problems. Information and files are accessible to anyone, anywhere, anytime — with a password. Furthermore, you can easily connect to anyone who is online, including your parents.

SELF SERVE ONLINE IS CONVENIENT FOR PARENTS

Cloud computing is the way of the future. Because it works. It is powerful. Not only does it save time, reduce duplication and simplify everything it creates access, provides convenience and raises service levels for clients.

A great example is internet banking. By allowing access to bank accounts online, banks create convenience for their customers. But also, they save a huge amount of teller time on transactions, reporting balances, etc. Instead of tellers getting balances or printing out statements, customers do it themselves.

The same is true for your early learning program. Educa holds the information parents care the most about, updates on their child. And because a child’s development track is constantly changing, there is a desire to access records many times in the course of a year, access that is made convenient through the shared Educa platform. No need to call in and ask the teacher for updates or to remember to ask at drop off, etc. — parents can access their child’s record at their leisure.

Not only does this access take the teacher out of the loop (saving time), it means the parent sees what the teacher sees. This leads to more cohesion in thinking and a tighter collaboration between center and home.

AND SAVES YOU TIME

Furthermore, by giving parents access to their child’s records and to forms, etc., if they need to print something out they do it themselves.

No more of this: receive a request for a form or child info, print or photocopy it, put it in a back pack, repeat if the document does not make it home. Multiply that little sequence by a hundred each month and you can start to imagine the cost savings for your center. All for the about the monthly cost of a printer cartridge.

DESIGNED FOR EARLY EDUCATORS

Educa has all the elements of time saving listed above, for only $1/child/month.

And it is designed specifically for early educators. This means it is child-centered, it pays special attention to layers of access and privacy issues as well as allowing for the varying roles educators play in an early learning program. All of these permissions and layers of protection save time in Educa.

While Educa was initially developed to bring teachers and parents together, most new features since the launch have a time-saving mission, harnessing the power of online software.

1/ REDUCING PAPER

There are two paper-heavy aspects to early education and Educa can help with both:

Paper notices — for parents and teachers

Documenting learning — activities, assessments and reflections

How much time does staff spend photocopying, printing and distributing paper notices? How much time do teachers spend filing and/or finding papers? And how much information gets lost, filed in the wrong place or goes unread.

Educa is a platform where teachers document online and share all in one step. Parents log on and/or get push notifications. Therefore, nothing goes missing, and there is less need for printing. If teachers need to review parent messages, they know where to go — to the child’s profile. When parents need a form, they download it in the secure parent portal.

If your teachers write observations on each child, the time savings from Educa multiply. Observations go into Educa, shared at the teacher’s option and then saved for future reference. Educa also has a customizable assessment feature, for tracking. Finally, everything is available for download and printing, if required.

Centers report paper and printing cost savings in the thousands of dollars when they switch to Educa. However, that is only part of the story. The staff time savings from handling paper and emails is an equally compelling benefit from the Educa system.

2/ CUTTING OUT DOUBLE ENTRY

Is your staff taking notes on a clip board or in a notebook, entering them into documentation system later on and then possibly sharing the activity in an email with parents or on a private Facebook page after that?

Educa ends all that.

The simplicity of online platforms like Educa is single entry. Enter information online once, and then is available for whoever needs to see it.

3/ MINIMIZING COMPLICATION

Parent communication is changing. From bulletin boards and paper notices to email to Facebook messages. As a result, many centers simply add new channels as they come up to the point now that communications are messy as each parent has a different preference. And so oftentimes centers post announcements in multiple places, a time-consuming task.

How much time is lost switching from one account to another — from email to Facebook, from a photo-sharing app to a Word document for printing, from a paper assessment back to email? And how many emails get lost in email inbox clutter, by teachers and by parents?

Wouldn’t it be nice for everyone if you could do all of that in one place?

Of course, with Educa this is all possible.

The Educa founder, admittedly a tech guy (we say lovingly!), was smart early on. He collaborated with educators who gave him a blunt message. Make it Simpler!

He heeded their advice and it is now our mantra — ease-of-use is arguably our best competitive feature.

Our goal with any upgrade is always to simplify, avoid long menus and to reduce multiple-step entry that we know will turn educators off.

“I am not a big user of IT and was quite apprehensive about using it. Now that I am on Educa, I find it really good and love the feedback I am getting from parents.”Jess, Carterton Preschool

Your Next Step

If your center needs to free up staff time, your best next step is to email us or call for a quick 10-15 minute demo of Educa. Or request access to a demo tour video and access to a live demo site here.